incumbent Furnifold M. Simmons. (Simmons would later lead the white supremacy campaigns that resulted in a new state constitution that disfranchised black citizens.) During the campaign, Cheatham was reported by North Carolina papers to have allegedly told black voters that Simmons and President Grover Cleveland would re-enslave them. Other press outlets of the time dismissed these allegations by the press as hyperbole or having misrepresented Cheatham's words. In a period of disfranchisement of blacks in the South, Cheatham was one of five African Americans elected to Congress during the Jim Crow era of the late nineteenth century. There were two from South Carolina, his brother-in-law George Henry White who followed him from North Carolina, and one from Virginia. After them, no African Americans would be elected from the South until 1972, after federal civil rights legislation enforcing constitutional rights for citizens, and no African American would be elected to Congress from North Carolina until 1992. Cheatham, then the only black North Carolina congressman, supported federal aid to education, and the McKinley tariff. He also supported the Federal Elections Bill in 1890, introduced by Henry Cabot Lodge, to provide federal enforcement to safeguard the voting rights of African Americans in the South. House Republicans had been concerned about the discriminatory practices of the Democrats and trying to gain passage of a bill since the 1880s. Lodge's bill narrowly passed the House but died in the Senate. Republicans were unable to get federal legislation passed on this issue as the Southern Democratic voting block became more powerful. Cheatham tended mostly to the needs of his constituents (of both races) but did not succeed in getting his own bills passed. Cheatham served on the House committees on Education, Expenditures on Public Buildings, and Agriculture, one of the more powerful. In 1890, Cheatham defended his seat and defeated the Democrat James M. Mewborne, with 16,943 votes to 15,713. But nationwide, Democrats re-took the House of Representatives, which meant that measures to protect black civil rights would not be passed. Cheatham was the only black congressman in the Fifty-second Congress (he also had been the only black congressman in the first half of the 51st Congress). He unsuccessfully sought re-election to a third term in 1892, after the North Carolina legislature changed the boundaries of his congressional district. Competition from a Populist on the ballot split some of the vote, contributing to the victory of